As the pharmaceutical industry continues to stack up scientific breakthroughs, there’s a growing need for experts within pharma organizations who can articulate deep disease knowledge, link clinical results to outcomes, and demonstrate product value. As luck would have it, a small department that’s well suited to the task has steadily been building its capabilities and expanding its reach into new areas. Medical affairs, once a little-known entity, is making its mark on the industry, but if leveraged properly, its impact could be even greater.

Boston-based Atul Gawande needs a new name plate as he adds CEO to an already long list of titles including surgeon, professor, writer and executive director. Gawande is a crusader who’s focused on improving healthcare delivery and accessibility, so company leaders Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon are confident that Gawande’s background and passion make him the ideal ambassador to advocate for and deliver a revamped healthcare experience for their collective employees in their joint healthcare entity, which we like to call “BerkshAmazMorgan.” For Gawande, this chief executive post likely is an appealing opportunity to experiment with an entirely new care delivery paradigm that one day could be applied outside these corporations’ walls.

The walls are coming down throughout the healthcare ecosystem as cross-industry M&A activity continues. From Walmart’s interest in Humana to Cigna’s push for Express Scripts, vertical integration is pairing up pharmacies, payers and PBMs. Healthcare sectors once separated by rigid corporate HQs now will be separated by the flimsy, pushpin-filled walls of office cubicles. Such deals abound across the healthcare landscape, and in corporate America, too, where companies—many of which already act as their own payers—are teaming up with providers to offer in-house healthcare options to employees.

This is the second post in a two-part series on the recently announced Berkshire Hathaway/Amazon/JPMorgan Chasehealthcare venture.

The U.S. healthcare system is broken. Most healthcare stakeholders now are willing to admit that, and many are actively trying to fix it—or at least starting to talk about what it would take to do so. Many of the recent consolidations and vertical integrations are the involved parties’ attempts at solving for links in the healthcare chain that they previously had no access to, or influence over. Now three giants from corporate America are looking to wade deeper into healthcare delivery to see if they can make some fixes for their employees—and for themselves.

As the pharmaceutical industry continues to stack up scientific breakthroughs, there’s a growing need for experts within pharma organizations who can articulate deep disease knowledge, link clinical results to outcomes, and demonstrate product value. As luck would have it, a small department that’s well suited to the task has steadily been building its capabilities and expanding its reach into new areas. Medical affairs, once a little-known entity, is making its mark on the industry, but if leveraged properly, its impact could be even greater.

Boston-based Atul Gawande needs a new name plate as he adds CEO to an already long list of titles including surgeon, professor, writer and executive director. Gawande is a crusader who’s focused on improving healthcare delivery and accessibility, so company leaders Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon are confident that Gawande’s background and passion make him the ideal ambassador to advocate for and deliver a revamped healthcare experience for their collective employees in their joint healthcare entity, which we like to call “BerkshAmazMorgan.” For Gawande, this chief executive post likely is an appealing opportunity to experiment with an entirely new care delivery paradigm that one day could be applied outside these corporations’ walls.

The walls are coming down throughout the healthcare ecosystem as cross-industry M&A activity continues. From Walmart’s interest in Humana to Cigna’s push for Express Scripts, vertical integration is pairing up pharmacies, payers and PBMs. Healthcare sectors once separated by rigid corporate HQs now will be separated by the flimsy, pushpin-filled walls of office cubicles. Such deals abound across the healthcare landscape, and in corporate America, too, where companies—many of which already act as their own payers—are teaming up with providers to offer in-house healthcare options to employees.

This is the second post in a two-part series on the recently announced Berkshire Hathaway/Amazon/JPMorgan Chasehealthcare venture.

The U.S. healthcare system is broken. Most healthcare stakeholders now are willing to admit that, and many are actively trying to fix it—or at least starting to talk about what it would take to do so. Many of the recent consolidations and vertical integrations are the involved parties’ attempts at solving for links in the healthcare chain that they previously had no access to, or influence over. Now three giants from corporate America are looking to wade deeper into healthcare delivery to see if they can make some fixes for their employees—and for themselves.